Who Will Save the Japan-South Korea Relationship?

A crisis is underway in Northeast Asia with great implications for American interests – and no, it has nothing to do with North Korea. In July, long-simmering tensions between Japan and South Korea, two U.S. treaty allies, erupted in a big way. Tokyo announced a new set of export controls on critical materials used mostly by South Korea’s high-tech manufacturing sector. The Japanese rationale was national security: Tokyo alleged that Seoul had not taken due care with these materials, which, while useful in the manufacture of displays and other components for consumer electronics, had weapons applications, too.

But this story didn’t begin in July 2019. A first major inflection point came in November 2018, when the South Korean Supreme Court decided that Japanese firm Mitsubishi was still liable to living Koreans for its use of forced labor during Japan’s occupation of Korea during much of the first half of the 20th century. Progressive South Korean President Moon Jae-in and his administration tacitly welcomed the decision. In Japan, meanwhile, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his right-leaning Liberal Democratic Party were furious. In the Japanese view, the South Korean government’s view of the ruling was another example in a long string of attempts by Seoul to reopen settled issues. Tokyo holds that all issues related to Imperial Japan’s use of forced Korean labor were settled during the normalization of diplomatic ties between the two countries in 1965.

Given the separation of powers in South Korea, there was nothing Moon could have realistically done to intervene in the court’s verdict. The outcome was driven by the judiciary and carried the force of law in South Korea. Japanese frustrations, however, were compounded by several other issues. For instance, Moon rejected the 2015 agreement, forged by his now-impeached-and-imprisoned predecessor Park Geun-hye, which purported to “irreversibly” settle the issue of Imperial Japan’s use of wartime Korean sex slaves – euphemistically called the “comfort women.” Park’s administration forged ahead with the deal without any buy-in from South Korean civil society. The Seoul-Tokyo agreement was hailed as historic and a source of relief in Washington, D.C., where the “comfort women” issue was mostly seen as an unfortunate historical wound that continued to keep two U.S. allies apart. The South Korean public disagreed, and, in 2017, Moon’s government effectively acknowledged that the deal did not mark the “irreversible” conclusion of that chapter in Japan-South Korea relations.

To make matters worse, the armed forces of the two countries engaged in a major standoff at the end of 2018. In December, a South Korean warship locked its fire control radar on a low-flying Japanese maritime surveillance aircraft. The move was interpreted by the Japanese crew as a threat; usually, a fire control radar lock-on is a step taken prior to a decision to fire on a target. Tokyo publicized the conduct of the South Korean warship and demanded an apology for what it called an “extremely dangerous” move. While the foreign ministers of both countries finally decided to take the issue out of the public sphere and proceed with private consultations to resolve their differences, the incident contributed to the broader mistrust between the two countries.

The ongoing crisis over Japanese export controls, then, is about much more than just export controls. Tokyo and Seoul are being pulled apart. Most critically, an important missing variable this time is a United States that is engaged in trilateral alliance management. Under the Obama administration, keeping South Korea and Japan on working terms was a major priority. It was efforts by the United States that allowed Park Geun-hye and Shinzo Abe to have their first meeting on the sidelines of the 2014 Nuclear Security Summit in The Hague. Park had been in office for more than a year before the meeting could take place. The American effort eventually culminated in the conclusion of the General Security of Military Information Agreement (GSOMIA) between Japan and South Korea – long a major objective for the Obama administration in its “pivot” to Asia, which included promoting greater inter-ally military cooperation.

GSOMIA, a result of American coordination, was not easily won. In 2012, under former South Korean President Lee Myung-bak, opposition lawmakers, including several progressives who find themselves dominant in Seoul today, opposed the agreement. Today, amid the standoff over Japan’s export controls, there are whispers in Seoul that GSOMIA may have been a mistake. Of course, this may be as much an attempt at brinkmanship by Seoul in an attempt to get Washington to intervene on its behalf as it is a deeply held view, but the stakes are incredibly high. Bilateral consultations between Seoul and Tokyo have failed to produced a path out and the United States appears wary about its role as mediator. The crisis appears to have no end in sight.

Under the Trump administration, not only has trilateral U.S.-Japan-South Korea coordination not been a priority, but some of the most valuable institutionalized contacts that had been set up by the end of the Obama administration were also lost to transition and flux. For instance, by the end of Obama’s second term, there was a regular deputy foreign ministers’ level trilateral consultation. On the U.S. side, this was led by Deputy Secretary of State Anthony Blinken. John Sullivan, the incumbent in that position, hasn’t carried forward the dialogue. The breakout of the current crisis came shortly after the confirmation of David Stilwell, who becomes the first Senate-confirmed, non-acting U.S. official to lead the State Department’s Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs under the Trump administration. But Stilwell, who traveled to Seoul and Tokyo in July on his first overseas visit, was unable to contribute productively to walking the two countries back from the brink. Stilwell sidestepped the issue entirely in Seoul while only giving a perfunctory nod to the possibility of U.S. mediation in Seoul. The possibility of Matt Pottinger, the U.S. National Security Council senior director in charge of East Asia since the early days of Trump administration, mediating more directly has been raised, but his role remains indeterminate.

What is most disturbing is that there may truly be nothing the United States can do at this point to draw down the crisis. Both Moon and Abe are allowing manifestations of political nationalism to guide their policy toward the other’s country. As long as each remains in power, there may not be an easy way to salvage South Korea-Japan relations. Moreover, with the export controls, Japan’s status as a peer economic competitor with South Korea has become more apparent. If the export controls stick, South Koreans expect that some of the country’s most successful global electronic brands will take a hit. Moreover, after the 2016-2017 shock over China’s unofficial sanctioning of South Korea for its acceptance of the U.S. Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile defense system, Japan’s export controls underline for Seoul just how vulnerable its economic interdependence with its neighbors has left it. This crisis is bound to get worse before it gets better, and the United States is neither ready nor able to reduce tensions.